I was never much of a fan of comic books trying to appropriate popular slang. It seemed they were always a year late and a dialect short. This appears to be a Julie Schwartz inspired cover because of the large disembodied hand point at the Flash. This is the second cover with the large hand motif and there are more to come. I was never much of a fan of these covers either.
However, lest you feel you’ve caught me on a grumpy day, the issue does feature a rather inspired new villain in Abra Kadabra. The first inspiring thing is his look which has a Salvador Dali like figure dressed in an old timey victorian looking magician’s stage dress. Infantino has a blast with the high collared billowing cape with the final inspired touch being that, except for his face, Abra is left uncolored presented in stark black and white which makes for a striking graphic contrast.
The Broome premise is pretty clever too. Abra is a magician in the future whose occupation has been rendered obsolete by science. Abra is old school and longs for the days when magic was a skill. So he steals a time machine and travels back to 1962 practice his art in simpler times. Unfortunately, he has to resort to crime to create publicity for his act and this draws the attention of the Flash. During a performance he shoots the Flash into space for the umpteenth time and this one is the silliest of the “let’s shoot the Flash into space” attempts so far. Yes I know the whole shooting into space thing is kind of dumb to begin with, but this one deserves a special prize all its own. Barry (since he’s sans costume, I’ll refer to him as Barry) is thinking as he flies off: “I may discover a new world! It’s really exciting… if I can overlook the terrible danger!” Well, yeah… got to give the guy points for the go-getter attitude. He’s attracted by the gravity of a small planetoid, and he returns to Earth by running around the planetoid until he reaches escape velocity and then shoots back home coming in at the perfect reentry angle. I rest my case. The Flash captures Abra, and the nice touch at the end is that no one suspects they have a guest from the future in the calaboose. No expository speech from the villain telling one and all who he is and what he’s about. A very subtle but enjoyable twist. Points for that.
The second story purports to tell why the Flash decided to wear a mask, but instead it just turns out to be a dream sequence. Even by the age of thirteen, I’d already seen too many of those. No points.
